Three Ways to Think Differently

I received an email the other day from Peter of I Will Change Your Life.com asking me to participate in the Think Different Challenge. Peter reminds us to try to look for the positive aspects in our lives even when things are not going as planned, or as we hoped – I agree.

There are three expressions, or mantras, I have learned over the years which help me to think differently when confronted with unpleasant, or unplanned, circumstances.

The first idiom tells us, “When you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras.” The meaning behind this sage advice is to not always think or assume the worst. Sometimes the solutions to our problems are very common ones and not at all difficult to discover.

Next, having been born and raised in the South, I often heard the saying, “When God gives you lemons, make lemonade.” The meaning here is obvious. We may not always want, or expect, lemons (we would rather have something less sour and much sweeter), but it is inevitable we will be given lemons from time-to-time.

Rather than giving up or getting overly discouraged, try to make the most of the situation by getting the most from the situation. For example, my wife and I bought our 16-year-old son a 2002 Ford Ranger pick-up truck for his birthday back in September. He was driving a 1999 Saturn which was in desperate need of repair.

The plan was to buy the truck and sell the Saturn; using the money from the sale of the car to help pay for the truck. Well, a month and a half later we still have not been able to sell the Saturn – a bag of lemons to be sure.

Time to make lemonade.

The lease on my wife’s car is up in January. She is a second-year graduate student with little time to shop for a new car. In addition, her grad school tuition has been somewhat of a financial load on us (our oldest two children are also in college).

Mary Beth suggested the other day we should just make the necessary repairs on the Saturn and she would drive it until June (when she graduates.) The monthly lease payments we had budgeted during those six months can now be applied to her education expenses. She found a way turn lemons into lemonade.

Finally, the last expression that challenges me to think differently in difficult situations is to always seek “the rest of the story.”

There is always the rest of the story. In other words, when someone presents you with a problem try to peel down to the root-cause in order to uncover all of the information relating to the problem.

It is also important to avoid taking things at face value without seeking a total understanding or seeking a definition of the whole picture. Often times, how things appear is not always how they exist.

I’m responsible for a marketing and technology department for a publishing company. Our customers use the software my group develops in order to create and submit their projects to us. Often times, one of our sales representatives will call me to say the software is not working. Rather than overacting and running down the hall to have the programmers fix an undefined bug, I ask, “What’s happening, exactly?”

More than times than not, the customer is trying to use the software in an unsupported way, or there are conflicts with their own computer network that are causing the deviations. By asking for the “rest of the story,” I’m able to get the sales rep, and the customer, to think differently, too. They are now in a position to better understand how to use the software in order to maximize their results and increase their level of success and happiness.

I have tagged the following bloggers for them to participate in the Think Different Challenge too.

Edith Yeung of Edith Yeung.com Dream Think Act

Tupelo Kenyon of Tupelo Kenyon.com

John Crenshaw of Dominate Your Life

Lorraine Cohen of Powerfull Living

Dominic Tay of Dominic Tay Dot Com

Warren Wong of What I Think About.com

Raul Bhambhani of Take-20.com

Karen Lynch of Live the Power

Albert Foong of UrbanMonk.net

If you name is not on list, but would like to participate, please feel free to do so. Contact me for a list of bloggers you can tag.

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